On "Hope Atherton's Wanderings"
Paul Metcalf
Articulation of Sound Forms in Time opens with a somewhat conventional historical root. She quotes the story of one Hope Atherton who, in a battle against the Indians on the west side of the Connecticut River, became separated from his company, wandered for several days, and showed up in Hadley, east of the river, having crossed by some unexplained means.
The tale is ripe with ambiguities. First of all, Hope is a owman’s name, and yet this is a man. Gender ambiguity. Then, how did he arrive east of the river? ("'Deep water' he must have crossed over") He says he offered to surrender to the enemy, but they would not receive him. His story is held, suspect -- truth and fiction are tossed together like dice -- and it is suggested that "he was beside himself," i.e., crazy.
He says that the Indians fled from him, thinking him the Englishman's God. Is that what craziness is? The origin of religion?
With this grounding in history, but given at once a variety of paradoxes and liberties, the poems take off, like a "wanton meteor ensign streaming":
"Cries open to the words inside them / Cries hurled through the Woods"
"archaic hallucinatory laughter"
"kneel to intellect in our work / Chaos cast cold intellect back"
If one wishes, the whole poem may be taken as the internal ramblings of Hope Atherton: male/female, "beside himself," etc.
More than once a friend or critic has suggested to me that, in order to write some of the things I have written, I must have experienced "dissociated states." I don't follow this logic. Did Shakespeare have to be crazy to write Lear. An assassin, to write MacBeth? By the same token, however wild and abandoned some of the language in Articulation of Sound Forms in Time, Howe is never wholly out of touch. She rambles and adventures on a long, loose tether, but it is there, one end tied to the ambiguous Hope Atherton, while the other she tosses playfully from hand to hand.
Perhaps one of the difficulties she may offer her readers -- and it is a difficulty I think I share with her -- is pointed out by Butterick: " . . . her technique was always of interest for how one might accomplish a narrative without a narrator, or with a minimum of intrusive narrator asking for one's trust."
Her technique is almost absence of technique. Inventive and innovative as she is, she is not artful. And this brings us back to the suggestion of objectivism, the mistrust of metaphor, the shedding of herself from her lines. Here, we do not have roles, voices, personae, etc. Rather, the summation of all of these -- is Susan Howe.
. . . .
At the end of Part 1 of Articulation, in the midst of all the density and adventuring in the poem, stands as lovely a lyric as one would care to read:
"Loving Friends and Kindred: -- / When I look back / So short in charity and good works / We are a small remnant / of signal escapes wonderful in themselves / We march from our camp a little and come home / Lost the beaten track and so / River section dark all this time / We must not worry / how few we are and fall from each other / More than language can express / Hope for the artist in America & etc / This is my birthday / These are the old home trees"
Yes.
Marjorie Perloff
Flocks roost before dark
Coveys nestle and settle
Meditation of a world's vast Memory
Predominance pitched across history
Collision or collusion with history
--Howe, Articulations
The two words are identical except for a single letter: according to the OED, collision means "1. The action of colliding or forcibly striking or dashing together; violent encounter of a moving body with another. 2a. The coming together of sounds with harsh effect. 3.fig. Encounter of opposed ideas, interests, etc. clashing, hostile encounter." Whereas collusion means "Secret agreement or understanding for purposes of trickery or fraud; underhand scheming or working with another; deceit, fraud, trickery."
What a difference a phoneme makes! One's collision with history may be accidental, an encounter of opposed ideas neither planned nor anticipated. One's collusion, on the other hand, is by definition premeditated. Attentiveness to such difference (/i/ versus /uw/) has always distinguished Susan Howe's "history poems" from those of her contemporaries. . . .
Perhaps
the best place to show how this process works is in Howe's most recent book, Articulation
of Sound Forms in Time. On the first and otherwise blank page of this long poem, we
read:
from seaweed said nor repossess rest
scape esaid
From seaweed said: the story to be told here, if not quite "Spelt from Sybil's Leaves" (Hopkins), evidently consists of fragments shored from the ocean of our American subconscious. Yet one cannot "repossess [the] rest"; or, since what is said from seaweed cannot be repossessed, one must rest one's case. Or just rest. "Scape" may refer either to the seascape or to the landscape or, most plausibly, it may be an abridged version of escape: "there is, no escape, he said," or "let it be said from what the seaweed said" (cf. Eliot's "What the Thunder Said"), no escape, moreover, from the desire to repossess the rest.
Obviously there are many ways of interpreting the eight words in these two lines, which is not to say that they can mean anything we want them to mean. We know from this introduction that an attempt will be made to "repossess" something lost, something primordial. The sound structure of the passage, with its slant rhyme of sea/weed and repossess/rest, its consonance of weed/said/esaid, and its alliteration of s's (nine out of forty-one characters) and assonance of e's and o's, enacts a ritual of repossession we can hear and see. And so small are the individual morphemes--from, said, scape, esaid--that we process them one by one, with difficulty. This "saying" "from seaweed" will evidently not be easy.
Who speaks these opening lines? The voice is impersonal, part bardic, part comic--a voice akin to Beckett's in Ping or Lessness. But the abrupt opening is immediately juxtaposed to a document, a text taken from the "real" world, namely, an "EXTRACT from a LETTER (dated June 8th, 1781,) of Stephen Williams to President Styles":
[Perloff quotes the Williams letter]
I reproduce this document in its entirety so that we can see what Howe does with her donnée. For Articulation of Sound Forms in Time is by no means a retelling of the Hope Atherton story or the invention of an up-to-date analogue that points to the "relevance" of the Indian Wars to our own time. Still, the story, as gleaned from the letter above and from a number of old chronicles of New England towns, is inscribed everywhere in Howe's poem. It draws, for example, upon the basic paradox that the Reverend Hope Atherton, ostensibly a Man of God, would accompany the Colonial militia on an Indian raid. And further, that having somehow gotten separated "from the company," this "little man with a black coat and without a hat," as one chronicle calls him, would surrender himself to the Indians, only to be rejected by them as suspect, indeed perhaps the "Englishman's God." Suspect as well to his own people, who, upon his return to Hatfield, refused to believe his story. Atherton, in the words of the chronicle, "never recovered from the exposure" and died within the year, an isolated figure, indeed something of a pariah.
Such "untraceable wandering" culminating in the "nimbus of extinction" is, so Howe believes, a ubiquitous fact of early New England history, and its burden continues to haunt our language.
. . . .
In a sermon of 28 May 1670, reproduced in one of Howe's sources for Articulation of Sound Forms in Time, the Reverend Hope Atherton recalls that when, in his forest wanderings, he came face to face with the Indians, "I spake such language as I thought they understood." But evidently "they" did not understand, and this failure-to-understand what the other is saying becomes Howe's point of departure in Articulation. Here is the opening poem of part 1, "Hope Atherton's Wanderings":
Prest try to set after grandmother
revived by and laid down left ly
little distant each other and fro
Saw digression hobbling driftwood
forage two rotted beans & etc.
Redy to faint slaughter story so
Gone and signal through deep water
Mr. Atherton's story
Hope Atherton
We note right away that in this poem Hope Atherton is not a "character," with such and such traits and a definable history. The "Wanderings" of Howe's title (there are sixteen sections in part 1, ranging in length from two to fifteen lines) are presented, not as articulations of time--not, that is to say, as accounts of what happened--but in time, in the time it takes to articulate the "sound forms" themselves. Thus poem #1 is a deceptive square (eight lines of predominantly eight- and nine-syllable lines), which tries to contain, both visually and aurally, the linguistic displacements produced by a faulty memory.
The first word, Prest, may refer to Atherton's condition: he was pressed by the Indians to "try to set after" his own people, perhaps after he was revived by a grandmother and left to lie ("ly") in the forest. But the absence of the subject or object of "Prest" brings other meanings into play: "oppressed," impressed," "presto." We cannot be sure whom "he" (if there is a he here) was "revived by," or whose "grandmother" is involved. As for "left ly," the tiny suffix makes it possible to bring to bear a whole host of -ly words: "left mercilessly," "left unkindly," "left ruthlessly," "left carelessly." The reader is given all these options; he or she can construct any number of scenarios in which two people are lying a "little distant [from] each other" and moving to and "fro." It is only dimly, after all, that we can reconstruct the Colonial/Indian conflict, with the colonists' "hobbling driftwood" and "forag[ing] two rotted beans & etc."--"& etc." suggests that it is what comes after speech ceases that matters--as well as the militia's "Redy to faint slaughter story," a story, "Mr. Atherton's story," now "so gone" that it can only come to us as a "signal through deep water."
Not only does Howe frequently decompose, transpose, and refigure the word (as in ly); she consistently breaks down or, as John Cage would put it, "demilitarizes" the syntax of her verbal units. Reading the poem above, one is never sure what subject pronoun goes with what verb, what object follows a given preposition, which of two nouns a participle is modifying, what phrases a conjunction connects, and so on. An extraordinarily taut sound structure--e.g., "revived by and laid down left ly"--holds in check a syntax that all but breaks down into babble. Indeed, by poem #8 all the connectives that make up "normal" syntax have been abandoned:
rest chrondriacal lunacy
velc cello viable toil
quench conch uncannunc
drumm amonoosuck ythian
Is "rest" a noun or a verb and how does it relate to "chondriacal" (hyperchondriacal?) "lunacy"? In line 2, "velc" may be an abridgment of "velocity," which doesn't help us make sense of the intricately sounded catalog "velc cello viable toil"; in line 3, "uncannunc" contains both "uncanny" and "annunciation" (the prophecy, perhaps of the "conch" shell which cannot "quench" our thirst); in line 4, the Anglo-Saxon ("drumm"), Indian ("amonoosuck"), and Greek ("ythian") come together in a "collusion" that makes us wonder if the "rest" isn't some sort of hyperchondriacal lunacy on Atherton's part. Or, some would say, a "lunacy" on the poet's part as well.
What justifies such extreme verbal and syntactic deconstruction, a decomposition that has become something of a Howe signature? Is the obscurity of Articulation merely pretentious? Confronted by lines like "velc cello viable toil," many readers have closed the book, concluding that the poet is talking only to herself. The charges leveled against "language poetry" in general--obscurity, abstraction, lack of emotion, the absence of lyric selfhood--all these can easily be leveled at Susan Howe. Yet even readers unsympathetic to her work, readers who claim a book like Articulation is too private, that it isn't really "about" anything, will, I submit, find themselves repeating lines like "velc cello viable toil," if for no other apparent value than their complex music, the way e, l, and c in the first word reappear as cel in the second, or the way the v, e, l in velc reappear in the very different sounding word viable, the latter also containing the l of cello and toil.
Is this then jabberwocky, nonsense verse? If Howe wants to talk about Hope Atherton's mission to the Indians or apply the 'themes" implicit in the tale--Colonial greed, Puritan zeal, the fruits of imperialism, the loneliness of exile, the inability to communicate with the Other--to the contemporary situation, why doesn't she just get on with it? Even a prose piece like the Mary Rowlandson essay is, after all, by and large comprehensible.
It would be easy to counter that the breakdown of articulation, which is the poem's subject, is embodied in the actual breakdown of the language, that the fragmentation of the universe is somehow mirrored in the fragmentary nature of the text. But the fact is that in Howe's work, as in Charles Bernstein's or Lyn Hejinian's, demilitarization of syntax may well function in precisely the opposite way--namely, as a response to the all-too-ordered, indeed formulaic, syntax that characterizes the typical "workshop" poem.
Poem #5, for example, articulates a "sound form" that refers to Hope Atherton's journey home:
Two blew bird eggs plat
Habitants before dark
Little way went mistook awake
abt again Clay Gully
espied bounds to leop over
Selah cithera Opynnc be
5 rails high houselot Cow
Kinsmen I pray you hasten
Furious Nipnet Ninep Ninap
Little Pansett fence with ditch
Clear stumps grubbing ploughing
Clearing the land
"Two blew bird eggs plat": "blew" is a pun on "blue" and "plat" means "flat" as well as the truncated "plate." The image of the "Two blew bird eggs plat" gives a fairy-tale aura to this segment of the journey, as does "Little way went mistook" with its Hansel and Gretel echo. Again, the "bounds to leop over" ["Ieop" is OE for "leap"] are more than "houselot" divisions, for the real crossing of the poem is over the borders into another language where the "babble-babel" is formed from words and sounds taken from Hebrew ("Selah"), Indian ("Nipnet Ninep Ninap"), and English ("Clay Gully"), with the mythological reference to Venus's isle "Cythera" thrown in.
The poems now become increasingly fragmented, gnomic, enigmatic, as if the breakdown depicted is not so much Hope's as that of language itself. Regression sets in, poem #9 going back to Anglo-Saxon origins:
scow aback din
flicker skaeg ne
barge quagg peat
sieve catacomb
stint chisel sect
and then in #13 to a kind of aphasia, words, now without any modification or relationship, being laid out on the page as follows:
chaotic architect repudiate line Q confine lie link realm
circle a euclidean curtail theme theme toll function coda
severity whey crayon so distant grain scalp gnat carol
omen Cur cornice zed primitive shad sac stone fur bray
tub epoch too tall fum alter rude recess emblem sixty key
Epithets young in a box told as you fly
By this time, Hope's search has become the poet's search. It is the poet who must deal with the "chaotic," must "repudiate" the "line" that "confine[s]," the "euclidean" "circle" too neat in its resolution of "theme theme," and the "severity" of its "coda." But one can also read this poem as dealing with any form of making, of "architect[ure]," the placement of "cornice" and "stone" so as to "alter rude" appearances. And the Indian motif never quite disappears, here found in the reference to "scalp," "gnat," "primitive," and "rude."
In #13, words are spread out insistently on the white ground of the page; in #15, by contrast, words run together:
MoheganToForceImmanenceShotStepSeeShowerFiftyTree
UpConcatenationLessonLittleAKantianEmpiricalMaoris
HumTemporal-spatioLostAreLifeAbstractSoRemotePossess
ReddenBorderViewHaloPastApparition0penMostNotion is
The "collusion" that forces words into this particular "collision" is oddly painful: the text is, so to speak, wounded, as if to say that the nightmare war with the Savage Other has come back to haunt Hope/Howe with its "AKantian Empirical" "Force" or "Immanence" of "Mohegan" or "Maori" presence, its reference to "Shot," "Shower," "Fifty Tree," "ReddenBorderView." This particular lyric concludes with a refrain already articulated in #14, a couplet producing a verbal mirror image:
blue glare(essence)cow bed leg extinct draw scribe sideup
even blue(A)ash-tree fleece comfort (B)draw scribe upside
"Sideup"/"upside" is a breaking point; after this particular collision, the sequence suddenly shifts to the formal and coherent monologue (#17) of Hope Atherton himself:
Loving Friends and Kindred: -
When I look back
So short in charity and good works
We are a small remnant
Of signal escapes wonderful in themselves
We march from our camp a little
and come home
Lost the beaten track and so
River section dark all this time
We must not worry
how few we are and fall from each other
More than language can express
Hope for the artist in America & etc
This is my birthday
These are the old home trees
On a first reading, this lyric coda seems excessively sentimental as well as unwarranted. Having wandered with great difficulty through the forest of the preceding lyrics, one is, of course, relieved to come into this clearing, to hear the sermonlike address to "Loving Friends and Kindred." But the resolution here provided--"We must not worry / how few we are and fall from each other / More than language can express / Hope for the artist in America & etc"--is a shade too easy, given the intractability of the material that has been put before us. How and why, after all, does Hope become Howe? How and why is there "Hope for the artist in America"? And finally, what do we do once we reach the birthday when we settle down under "the old home trees"?
. . . [T]he voicing of desire in Articulation, as in Howe's other poems, avoids the personal "I" so pervasive in contemporary lyric. Ostensibly absent and calling no attention to the problems and desires of the "real" Susan Howe, the poet's self is nevertheless inscribed in the linguistic interstices of her poetic text. Howe has been called impersonal, but one could argue that the "muffled discourse from distance," the "collusion with history" in her poetry, is everywhere charged with her presence. She is not, after all, a chronicler, telling us some Indian story from the New England past, but a poet trying to come to terms with her New England past, her sense of herself vis-à-vis the Colonial settlers' actions, her re-creation of the Hope Atherton story in relation to Norse myth as well as to contemporary feminist theory.
Most contemporary feminist poetry takes as emblematic its author's own experience of power relations, her personal struggle with patriarchy, her sense of marginalization, her view of social justice. There are Howe's subjects as well, but in substituting "impersonal" narratives--a narrative made of collage fragments realigned and recharged--for the more usual lyric "I," Howe is suggesting that the personal is always already political, specifically, that the contemporary Irish-American New England woman who is Susan Howe cannot be understood apart from her history. But history also teaches the poet that, however marginalized women have been in American culture and however much men have been the purveyors of power, those who have suffered the loss of the Word are by no means only women. Indeed, what Howe calls the "Occult ferocity of origin" is an obstacle that only a persistent "edging and dodging" will displace if we are serious about "Taking the Forest."
From Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric. Copyright © 1990 by Marjorie Perloff.
Peter Nicholls
Her Dickinson, then, is above all an experimenter with language, and "voice," far from being some ingenuous supplement to self, locates the poem in what Howe calls "a wilderness of language formed from old legends, precursor poems, archaic words, industrial and literary detritus" (My Emily 70).
Language is by this account a wilderness, then, but a wilderness which--paradoxically--must now be unsettled if we are to avoid the Puritan trap of (as Howe puts it) "a dialectical construction of the American land as a virgin garden preestablished for them by the Author and Finisher of creation" (Birth-Mark 49). Wilderness, we conclude, is not an antithetical term to culture, nor, from another point of view, is it simply a recognizable place; for, rather like Jacques Lacan's concept of the unconscious, Howe's wilderness is a text composed of gaps and traces. It is also like the archives from which knowledge of a historical wilderness can now be drawn, for (as Howe puts it) "If you are a woman, archives hold perpetual ironies. Because the gaps and silences are where you find yourself." No punctual authentic self awaits discovery here; or rather that alien self is discernible only in the marks that testify to the violence of erasure. Howe's wilderness thus contains no neatly dialectical "other" to community but evokes instead a process which is internal to signification and disruptive of it.
. . . .
The brokenness of such writing--Dickinson' almost as much as Howe's--seems to defy syntactical regulation. In its pursuit of "immediacy," says Howe, "Codes are confounded and converted" (BirthMark 139). This is Dickinson's way of choosing a certain discursive "silence" rather than having it thrust upon her, of rejecting the facility of current poetic convention in favor, says Howe, of a language of "stuttering" and "stammering" (My Emily 21). Like Gertrude Stein, Dickinson "broke the codes that negated her" (My Emily 12), and she did so (rather like Anne Hutchinson, thinks Howe) by rejecting the "fluent language of fanaticism" (Articulation 31) for one that enlisted the alleged inchoateness of women's speech as precisely a strength rather than a weakness. What that refusal of "fluency" might entail for a reading of American history can be deduced from the opening stanzas of section 2 of Howe's long poem Articulation of Sound Forms in Time. The section is entitled "Hope Atherton's Wanderings":
Prest try to set after grandmother
revived by and laid down left ly
little distant each other and fro
Saw digression hobbling driftwood
forage two rotted beans & etc.
Redy to faint slaughter story so
Gone and signal through deep water
Mr. Atherton's story
Hope Atherton
Clog nutmeg abt noon
scraping cano muzzell
foot path sand and so
gravel rubbish vandal
Horse flesh ryal tabl
sand enemys flood sun
Danielle Warnare Servt
Turner Falls Fight us
Next wearer April One
Howe gives the poem a context in a preliminary note. The episode to which it refers is taken from a battle known as the Falls Fight of 1676 in which a small colonial force destroyed an Indian encampment. The colonists were their pursued, and, after substantial losses, most of them managed to make it home. A small group of soldiers, and with them the Reverend Hope Atherton, were lost in the course of the withdrawal. After several days the soldiers gave themselves up to the Indians, who burned most of them alive. Atherton seems to have been one of the few to have been spared, and according to a contemporary report this was because when "a little man with a black coat and without any hat, came toward them . . . they were afraid and ran from him, thinking it was the Englishman's God" (Articulation 5). As Howe says in her preliminary note, this was "Hope's baptism of fire." The community, however, refused to believe his story, and he died shortly afterward. Atherton, we conclude, has no place on either side of the boundary, and his "wanderings" in the wilderness are taken as a figure for what lies outside. Like Dickinson and Rowlandson, Hope (a woman's name, notes Howe) falls out of the safe discursive space of a "prophetic and corporate" identity--though his wanderings remain "untraceable," not directly narratable. As Howe has said in discussion, "Of course I can't really bring back a particular time. That's true. Or it's true if you think of time as moving in a particular direction--forward you say. But what if then is now" ("Encloser" 194).
The question is arch on the face of it, but less so when we look at the texture of the poem, which is concerned to reduce all narrative elements to residual traces (note the characteristic preponderance of nouns over verbs). Given what Howe has said in her preliminary account of the Falls Fight, though, we gamely struggle to make some sense of it. Marjorie Perloff, for example, begins her reading by suggesting that "The first word, Prest, may refer to Atherton's condition: he was pressed by the Indians to ‘try to set after' his own people, perhaps after he was revived by a grandmother and left to lie ('ly') in the forest. But the absence of the subject or object of 'Prest' brings other meanings into play: 'oppressed,' 'impressed,' 'presto'" (303). Linda Reinfeld, in another helpful discussion of Howe, deduces a similar hidden and fragmented narrative of Atherton's wanderings (139-40).
Howe's source for the story, she says in an interview, was a history of the town of Hadley, though she seems to have sent Perloff an excerpt from a history of Hatfield. Either way, the documents from which the first six stanzas of Articulation are drawn can also be found in another text that Howe must have used, George Sheldon's A History of Deerfield, Massachusetts, first published in 1895-96 (she must have used this work, because Articulation takes items not only from the relevant manuscripts but also from Sheldon's commentary on them). When we refer to this source we are in for a surprise, for the main passage used by Howe for her first six stanzas is headed "Escape of Jonathan Wells"; it has nothing at all to do with Hope Atherton! In fact, Howe takes only a couple of words from "Mr. Atherton's Story," and these are separated by more than a page of text: "A particular relation of extreme sufferings that I have undergone, & signal escapes that the Lord hath made way for" (Sheldon 1: 166). What we find in the penultimate line of Howe's first stanza is "Gone and signal through deep water." In the printed version of the manuscript, "undergone" is hyphenated across a line, so looking down the margin we do indeed find "gone, & signal escapes." A page later Howe picks up the phrase "I passed through deep waters," and the splice yields the line we have: "Gone and signal through deep water."
All this detail may seem trivial; after all, it is quite clear that, unlike a writer such as Pound, Howe has no desire to send us back to her sources, or, indeed, to encourage us to read them in tandem as I have started to do here. Perhaps, then, the source is irrelevant, though when we do have it before us we gain a particular insight into Howe's mode of composition. To begin with, it is very visually conditioned, producing constellations of words which combine in a way that forces prosody against syntax. This move carries us beyond the more familiar, modernist forms of fragmentation which tend to break discourse into phrases to recombine their elements into new wholes. In contrast, Howe attends to sound and to individual words, recombining these in an order that defies syntactical logic. Take the example commented oil by Perloff and Reinfeld. Here is part of the source passage for Howe's opening lines:
J. W. was glad to leave him, lest he shd be a clog or hindrance to him. Mr. W. grew faint, & once when ye indians prest him, he was near fainting away, but by eating a nutmeg, (which his grandmother gave him as he was going out) he was revived. (1: 162; emphases added)
Howe's selection of items actually tends to block the sort of emergent narrative that both Perloff and Reinfeld try to deduce from the text. Howe is more interested, for example, in the word "prest" than she is in its subject or object, and while we can just about see that the wandering hero (who isn't actually Hope) is "revived" by his grandmother's gift, the narrative potential of the saving nutmeg is never developed, Howe suspending reference to it until the first line of the second stanza: "Clog nutmeg abt noon." The rhythmic effect of this is striking, its strong demarcation of elements working to throw up obstacles in the path of thought. Elements reman opaque--even with this "source" I can do nothing with the mysterious "M" and "R" of stanzas 3 and 4, except to suggest (without any real support from the text) that the letters signal a general allusion to Mary Rowlandson's narrative.
This failure of "fluency," then, this substitution of a sort of molecular opacity for the integrative movements of narration, now becomes the means by which Howe situates her work in relation to a radical or "antinomian" tradition. "This tradition that I hope I am part of," she writes, "has involved a breaking of boundaries of all sorts. It involves a fracturing of discourse, a stammering even. Interruption and hesitation used as a force. A recognition that there is an other voice, an attempt to hear and speak it. It's this brokenness that interests me" ("Encloser" 192). Much is contained for Howe in that idea of hesitation, a word, as she notes, "from the Latin, meaning to stick. Stammer. To hold back in doubt, have difficulty in speaking" (My Emily 21). The failure to speak fluently becomes a strength as it sets up a resistance to conceptuality and dialectic, embedding a kind of violence at the heart of poetic language. Stammering keeps us on the verge of intelligibility, and in her own work Howe's emphasis on sound is coupled with a habitual shattering of language into bits and pieces. "The other of meaning," she tells us, "is indecipherable variation" (BirthMark 148), thus gesturing toward a writing that constantly courts the noncognitive in its preoccupation with graphic and phonic elements.
To write in this way is to jettison historical narrative at the same time that it is somehow a refusal to let go of the past, to give it up to "discourse." The figures that fascinate Howe--Rowlandson, Hutchinson, Dickinson--are those who seem to speak the language of enthusiasm, a language intermittently "stripped to its untranslatability" ("Difficulties Interview" 19), in which "truth" appears less as the product of moral judgment than as a force by which the past possesses the subject.
From "Unsettling the Wilderness: Susan Howe and American History." Contemporary Literature (1996). Copyright © 1996 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System.
Linda Reinfeld
Articulation of Sound Forms in Time can be read first of all as a journey of literary scholarship: it begins as a chronicle of Howe's researches into the myth of her own very specific locality as it appears in the printed histories of Hadley and Hatfield, Massachusetts. The focus of her investigation is the story of a seventeenth-century New England minister, Hope Atherton, who disappears during the course of a riverside battle between white settlers and American Indians and is thereafter presumed dead; some days later, however, he mysteriously reappears, unharmed but not entirely coherent, miles from the scene of the battle and on the opposite side of the river. Like the experience of the poet who explores the edges of consciousness, Hope's experience may be impossible to reconcile with the experience of what we think of as "mainstream" America.
Howe's Hope, in a dark moment, can sound like this:
rest chrondriacal lunacy
velc cello viable toil
quench conch uncannunc
drumm amonoosuck ythian
The apparent opacity of this discourse is deceptive. Given that the historical Hope Atherton, in the very process of crossing the river, must have been suffering from severe fatigue and hunger (he is reported to have gone for four days without food or drink), the passage opens into a number of possible and plausible (re)constructions: lunacy denotes madness but also carries with it a cyclical quality, an innocence that turns impotent in conjunction with the want and severe deprivation--here specifically the desire for and lack of rest--that precede it. Spatial dislocation, loss of ground, parallels "chrondriacal" dislocation in time. The neologism chrondriacal evokes a sense of periodicity but suggests more than the "chronicle" of a "hypochondriac," or "chronic" restlessness: the lunatic unpunctuated repetition of goodness uprooted and gone mad. The word velc--like Velcro--sticks, has the quality of a gulp; also, backward and truncated, it recalls cleave, pathetic in an instance where there is nothing to cling to. Sliding ls evoke a slippery medium: as language liquefies, it flows almost out of control. The lyricism of cello breaks down into the singular containment of cell and senses of isolation, while lo exactly places the speaker in the deep. As Lyn Hejinian remarks in another context, "To listen to music too closely resembles drowning."
[ . . . ]
The process is necessary because the ordinary unbroken literary language, as we have it literally exemplified in historical documents, has not been able to dramatize or even to record for public consideration the historical Hope Atherton's erratic, nondialectical journey through British and Indian forces, through the strong current of the Connecticut River, into a living present that would still prefer not to listen. When Atherton claims to have been left unharmed by the native Indians, for instance, his speech either is not believed, and is dismissed as crazy, because Indians are known to be heartless (such was the response he met from his contemporaries) or is believed, but then is dismissed as merely heartfelt, sentimental, because Indians are known not to be heartless (such is more likely to be the response today). Either way, his account is cast away, for the story does have holes in it. To my mind, the excellence of the kind of writing Howe attempts lies in its lacy, elliptical texture, the play between what one might call the discursive and dramatic Emersonian part of her poetry and the dark part, the refusal of that cocky American greeting (Good morning, good morning) so many of us as readers of American literature have grown to count on. The sound forms here articulated are sometimes more like gurgles than greetings. Such things happen: the trail can disappear.
[ . . . ]
In Articulation of Sound Forms in Time, Hope Atherton is first introduced by citing (without correction) the matter-of-fact and by no means fictional "EXTRACT from a LETTER (dated June 8th, 1781) of Stephen Williams to President Styles." Howe goes on to quote a substantial portion of this letter (literally, an account of an account) and by this doubled set of citations enacts the textual distance--and difficulty--through which Atherton is perceived: "Mr. Atherton gave account that he had offered to surrender himself to the enemy, but they would not receive him. Many people were not willing to give credit to this account, suggesting he was beside himself. This occasioned him to publish to his congregation and leave in writing the account I enclose to you."
For Hope--as for Howe in her dual role of scholar and poet--fugitive meaning is followed as it retreats from the complex battles of fact and theoretical speculation (how do we know what we know?) back into the black and white of primitive imagination, a vast minimalist canvas relieved only by bits of hearsay and copies of old letters.
[. . .]
The sixteen sections of "Hope Atherton's Wanderings"--each unnumbered section from two to fifteen lines long and each centered on its own unnumbered page--can be read as sixteen temporally consecutive and prosodically various articulations, that is, sound forms, of distress.
[. . .]
[A]s the journey unfolds, Hope moves from an only slightly disturbed language of narration at the beginning of Part I of Articulation of Sound Forms in Time--
Prest try to set after grandmother
relieved by and laid down left ly
little distant each other and fro
Saw digression hobbling driftwood
forage two rotted beans & etc.
Redy to faint slaughter story so
Gone and signal through deep water
Mr. Atherton's story Hope Atherton
--where, in spite of the absence of the I and the conventions of reportage, distortion is relatively minimal (compression and omission, effects of haste and fatigue, produce a "hobbling" after-the-battle discourse, which, in view of the wreckage evidenced by driftwood and digression, we can interpret as a mode of imitation within the given narrative frame), into a world of militant accents more and more rigid and threatening:
Rash catastrophe deaf evening
Bonds loosd catcht sedge environ
Extinct ordr set tableaux
hay and insolent army
Shape of so many comfortless
And deep so deep as my narrative
our homely manner and Myself
Said "matah" and "chirah"
Pease of all sorts and best
courtesy in every place
Whereat laughing they went away
At this point in his wanderings Atherton seems to have encountered some soldiers from a British regiment, remnants as it were of an "extinct ordr." They are "insolent" and by their insolence insulated from the tragedy around them, "deaf" to the "catastrophe" and "so many comfortless" of whom Atherton is so keenly aware. They are deaf also to the language natural to Hope, speaking as they do in accents unfamiliar to natives, white or Indian, of America. Howe cites matah and chirah; similarly, "Pease of all sorts" breaks down into a variety of meanings in conflict with one another: "Peace" as a greeting or term of surrender; "pease" as a form of porridge and by extension a plea for food. The verbal structure of this section, moving from the staccato of the first line, where each separate word demands an accent and refuses to move into syntactic combination, to the short two-word phrases of the third and fourth lines ('set tableaux"), then on to the more fully developed combinations of the fifth through eighth lines ("Shape of so many comfortless") and the narrative statement of the final three lines ("Whereat laughing they went away'), figures the predicament of individual person in relation to collective language, for as the words come together into coherent patterns of "courtesy in every place," all pattern is ironized and Hope is abandoned. If Hope Atherton survives, if poetry survives, it is, oddly enough, by virtue of isolation from human company and communion. To the extent that language makes sense, to the extent that it forges connections, it risks falsity and bad faith: it becomes regimental, the enemy. Only those chosen are saved and only the poet--specifically, the poet set apart by a capacity for visionary experience--can hope to emerge from chaos with something like self-possession ("My voice, drawn from my life, belongs to no one else"). As we move toward meaning, "deep so deep as my narrative," we move into a language so fluid that the rescue of reason becomes impossible. But then, it is not in reason that Howe has put her faith.
Faith should make it possible to read even the most profoundly mysterious visionary script. In the two sections preceding Hope's public address to his "loving friends and kindred" (one wonders who may be counted among them) language approaches perfect innocence, empties itself in the perpetual motion of reflection and refraction. Thought dissolves into the medium of thought so that the word alone, like Hope in the destructive element immersed, generates the zero degree of meaning that makes possible a providential imagination of grace and the renewed possibility of life.
[. . .]
The relation of the two "Posit gaze" sections of the poem to each other--where each of the lines performs a specific reflective action--dramatizes the constructive role of the poem in action: simple repetition, for the first line of either section is a simple duplication of the first line of the other; reverse reflection and condensation, inasmuch as the second through fifth lines of the two sections are composed of the same words exactly but with the words repeated backward and placed closer together in the second section; double repetition mixed with reverse reflection, since the sixth and seventh lines of each section work like a refrain ending with a one-word exchange: upside and sideup become sideup and upside in the second section. Language is inevitably caught by its capacity for imitation. As so often happens in the poetry of deconstruction, meaning or the negation of meaning resides not in the perception of formal depth but in the contingent activity of lateral motion.
Howe's Hope walks the fine line between art and chaos: "Nothing deserves to be called an art work that keeps the contingent at bay. For by definition, form is a form of something, and this something must not be allowed to degenerate into a tautological iteration of form. And yet the necessity of this relation that form has to something outside itself tends to undermine form. Form seeks to be pure and free of all heterogeneity, but it cannot be because it needs the heterogeneous. The immanence of form in heterogeneity has its limits" (AT, 315-16). It is possible to argue that language pushed to the limit of form cannot work successfully as art--to argue, for instance, that the heterogeneity of a line like "MoheganToForceImmanenceShotStepSeeShowerFiftyTree" is threatened by Howe's attempt "ToForceImmanence" or, conversely, to argue that "tree fifty shower see step shot Immanence force to mohegan" disintegrates into an undistinguished mix of unrelated and incommensurable vocabularies. "This tendency of English syntax to break thought down into its smallest, self-contained parts is probably the most formidable barrier to dialectics," comments Weber in his preface to Prisms (P, 13); Howe's poetry extends this tendency within the language to the point where translation into the order of legible prose becomes nearly impossible. Howe is no dialectician. It is not possible, however, to dismiss the argument provoked by such writing without at the same time dismissing the possibility that the human capacity for argument is inseparable from the human capacity for hope--or, in the allegorical figure of this instance, Hope. Hope is possible precisely because of, not in spite of, the decadence of language, our inability to bridge the great gap between the one and the many, truth and reason, faith and mystery. "In a world of brutal and oppressed life," writes Adorno, "decadence becomes the refuge of a potentially better life by renouncing its allegiance to this one and to its culture, its crudeness, and its sublimity" (P, 72).
It is a marvelous tour de force, this attempt by Susan Howe to read a surface from beneath it, to "posit" or position the self within language just below the level at which it might appear to make sense--no less wonderful than the somewhat more simply presented reading of the historical Hope Atherton as he addresses his congregation upon his return from underwater exile:
Loving Friends and Kindred:--
When I look back
So short in charity and good works
We are a small remnant
of signal escapes wonderful in themselves
We march from our camp a little
and come home
Lost the beaten track and so
River section dark all this time
We must not worry
how few we are and fall from each other
More than language can express
Hope for the artist in America & etc
This is my birthday
These are the old home trees
"There is nothing that gives the feel of Connecticut like coming home to it," wrote Wallace Stevens. "It is a question of coming home to the American self in the sort of place in which it was formed. Going back to Connecticut is a return to an origin." Like Stevens, like Eliot, Howe goes back, back to a significant landscape ("words are my way in sylvan/imagery," she writes at the outset of Pythagorean Silence) and back to the fragments of significance rescued from the works of an earlier time. These bits and pieces broken from their contexts--dislocated, as Hope Atherton is dislocated--have something pathetic, childlike about them:
[. . .]
What is most touching in the discourse of Hope, what makes it appear as art, is in part its presentation in a mode of almost childlike fragility: Hope cannot quite say what he means, but his moments of articulation, his perception embodied in the poem as a work of art (Howe's Hope) are meant--for a time--to go beyond the limits of intention.
Excerpted from a longer essay, "Susan Howe: Prisms," in Linda Reinfeld, Language Poetry: Writing as Rescue. Copyright © 1992 by Louisiana State UP.
Return to Susan Howe